Integrate Continuously

Commit Frequently

One metric that I think is most important to look at during an Agile transformation is the frequency of commits that developers make due to the build. This gives us a huge amount of information about several important things. First and foremost, it indicates the amount of friction in the build and how much work …

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Bits and Pieces

Keep Defects from Escaping

Toyota did not start out as a car company. They started by making industrial looms for the creation of textiles. They became a leading loom manufacturer by building looms that required minimal human intervention because they recognized that an operator’s time was expensive. If one operator could run a dozen looms instead of just one …

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Bits and Pieces

Why Why

In my last post, I discussed barely sufficient documentation and I said that the best place to express what the code is doing is in the code itself. But there is another form of documentation that we often overlook. It’s actually the most important kind of documentation yet we rarely devote even a sentence to …

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Bits and Pieces

Barely Sufficient Documentation

In Agile, when we say “barely sufficient documentation,” we’re not referring to user documentation. User documentation has been notoriously bad throughout the entire history of the software industry. As an industry, we must do much better with user documentation than we have in the past, but this post is not about user documentation, it’s about …

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